There are lives whose occupations could not be expressed in a formula,
yet they are precious to their surroundings and precious in themselves,
requiring more steady self-sacrifice than those which give the stimulus
of something definite to do. These need not feel themselves cut off from
what is highest in woman's education, if they realize that the mind has
a life in itself and makes its own existence there, not selfishly, but
indeed in a peculiarly selfless way, because it has nothing to show for
itself but some small round of unimpressive occupations; some perpetual
call upon its sympathies and devotion, not enough to fill a life, but
just enough to prevent it from turning to anything else. Then the higher
life has to be almost entirely within itself, and no one is there to see
the value of it all, least of all the one who lives it. There is no
stimulus, no success, no brilliancy; it is perhaps of all lives the
hardest to accept, yet what perfect workmanship it sometimes shows. Its
disappearance often reveals a whole tissue of indirect influences which
had gone forth from it; and who can tell how far this unregistered,
uncertificated higher education of a woman, without a degree and with an
exceedingly unassuming opinion of itself, may have extended.
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